Apple buying Disney: the rumor that won’t die
I’ve been following Apple long enough to remember when, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, journalists were seriously suggesting that “beleaguered” Apple might be an acquisition target for Disney. My, how the tables have turned. As Disney’s stock price continues to slide, it’s more recently been written about as a possible acquisition target for Apple.
Yesterday, Alex Sherman released a lengthy piece at CNBC that goes through the rocky recent history of Disney, and particularly the internal power struggles between Bob Iger and his brief successor Bob Chapek. It’s full of gossip by lots of former (and quite possibly disgruntled) employees, but near the bottom it does contain this juicy line:
More than a dozen past and present Disney executives said privately they believe Iger’s desired end game is to stay as CEO for as long as possible and then sell the company to Apple — Iger’s ties to the tech giant date back to his close personal relationship with co-founder Steve Jobs.
I’d be curious to know how Sherman arrived at that sentence. Did each of the “more than a dozen” Disney employees independently bring up that suggestion? Or did Sherman ask more than a dozen Disney employees, “Do you think Iger might sell Disney to Apple?”
Regardless, let’s put our thinking caps on and take this suggestion seriously: Could Apple buy Disney?
Apple buys multiple companies every year, but you rarely hear about these acquisitions because almost all of them are small firms you’ve never heard of that Apple is gobbling up for their patents, technology, talent, or some combination of those things. Apple’s most significant acquisition of all time was when struggling mid-90’s Apple bought NeXT. That brought Steve Jobs back to Apple as well as the software that would underpin Mac OS X a few years later. Apple largest acquisition in terms of money spent was Beats, which Apple bought for $3 billion. In the past they’ve resisted journalist and investor pressure to make a big, splashy acquisition like Netflix. So while none of this history rules out the possibility of Apple buying Disney, there’s nothing in Apple’s past that suggests they’d be interested in dropping that much coin on a corporate acquisition.
Still, there’s reasons to think it could happen. As Sherman’s piece mentions, there’s a lot of shared history between the two companies. Steve Jobs was CEO of Pixar for several years while also being CEO of Apple. Disney was the lone distributor of Pixar films and then eventually bought Pixar shortly after Iger took over as Disney’s CEO. That made Steve Jobs the largest single holder of Disney stock in the years before his death.
There are also a lot of cultural overlaps between the two companies in terms of how they think about product creation and delighting customers. I think Apple undoubtedly has a lot of respect for Walt Disney and his legacy.
It’s also not hard to imagine Apple desiring Disney’s IP and extensive catalog. They’d not only own all of Disney’s beloved historic characters, but also Marvel and Star Wars.
Tim Cook is someone who strikes me as valuing legacy, and is also rumored to be retiring in the next five to ten years. I could imagine him wanting to be remembered for saving Disney and incorporating it into Apple.
Why would it not make sense for Apple to buy Disney? Apart from the massive expense, it’s hard to imagine Apple running theme parks and a cruise line. They do have almost a quarter century of high end real estate management through their extensive network of retail stores, many of them in high end and/or historic districts, and Apple’s headquarters at Apple Park is one of the most distinctive corporate headquarters in the world.
Apple has also preferred to build their own movie and TV business rather than buying someone else’s. They easily could have bought Netflix years ago, but opted instead to build Apple TV+ from the ground up. It’s not clear they’d want to manage a large collection of existing intellectual property pieces.
I’d put the likelihood of Apple buying Disney at pretty low odds, but there’s enough there that you can’t categorically rule it out.